


Escalation

by inthedesert



Category: Good Girls (TV)
Genre: Bathroom Sex, Canon Compliant, Cheating, Drunk Sex, Episode: s02e04 Pick Your Poison, F/M, One Shot, POV Beth Boland, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:40:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24561715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inthedesert/pseuds/inthedesert
Summary: His hands on my skin were new and electrifying. The presence of him against me, the heat of his breath as he buried his face into my hair and the crook of my neck. I was just nerve-endings by this point, little thrills blooming like wildflowers across my skin.A hand up my skirt, pulling at my panties, tearing at them. His desperation surprised me and turned me on—he wanted to fuck me, right here right now.Revisiting our favorite part of Season 2 Episode 4, from Beth's point of view.
Relationships: Beth Boland/Rio
Comments: 10
Kudos: 231





	Escalation

**Author's Note:**

> I've had the idea for this fic in my head since this episode first aired, so I finally sat down to do something about it after the (early) conclusion of Season 3. Nothing revolutionary here, I just wanted to poke around in Beth's head (and stretch the bathroom scene out as long as possible lol). 
> 
> This is my first fic in almost a decade, so go easy on me! Hope you enjoy.

This is how I remember that night. It all seemed to escalate very quickly. The moments felt elastic—an hour or so sitting across the table from my husband folded into what felt like seconds; the few minutes locked in the bathroom with Rio swelling out so that heartbeats lasted entire minutes. There isn’t really a cohesive way to explain or make sense of what happened, but I’ll do my best.

I’d killed it at the dealership that day. Even Dean said so, which encouraged me. I was so excited to share my ideas with him and I was so sure I was onto something, something _good_ , and the day’s sales proved it. Dean had to agree—I didn’t know the full numbers, but they had to be better than what they’d been in years. All in a single day. No one could deny the success.

I should have anticipated Dean’s reaction. Should have known that he wouldn’t see it as a win for _us_ but instead a failure for _him_ , calling into question his own abilities as a salesman and decision-maker at the family business.

The disappointment of being so quickly shot down felt like a pit had opened beneath me and swallowed me whole. I don’t even remember everything he said, not sure if I even heard it—I may as well had left the room and only returned once my glass of bourbon arrived.

I ate dinner and didn’t taste it; felt only the burn of the alcohol as I sipped. There was a blot of darkness like a bruise in my chest that spread until it filled me completely and pressed outward against the layer of my skin. Eventually it was an experiment to see if Dean could even read me—my expression, my presence.

But he didn’t notice. Or he did and pretended not to, pretended everything was fine. Like he didn’t know disregarding my ideas the way he did—condescending me, telling me where I belong, calling us a _team_ —wasn’t offensive. Or maybe he honest-to-god didn’t know. I’m not sure what is worse of all of these options.

All through dinner I couldn’t stop picturing how differently I was regarded by Rio when I went to him with an idea or a plan. How, at the coffee shop, he sat forward with his bony elbows on the table and looked at me with his startling and unshakable focus while I spoke. I tried to bring to the surface of my memory a time where Dean considered me similarly and came up with nothing.

So I sat there and I drank the bourbon and I simmered in these thoughts and Dean ordered from the desert platter and I ordered another drink. Where could I put all this resentment, this bitterness? He asked if I wanted to go home. Home was the last place I wanted to be. I wanted to be as far away from myself as possible. Once Annie and Ruby had said they thought I was _crawling out of my skin_ and here I was, fantasizing about just that.

Lately, even the sound of my own name seemed to induce a migraine. Everything I saw or touched was either a reminder of my fraying grasp on my cookie-cutter lifestyle or of the dangerous decisions I have made in order to maintain the illusion of it. Reminders of everything my life had been for so long—tiny checked boxes and birth certificates and laundry detergent and a path so well-trodden it was nice and smooth and boring.

I wanted to be someone without a routine, someone who stays out late, who keeps ordering liquor even though happy hour ended hours ago. I wanted to be someone bold, someone who took risks, someone who _fought back_ , or at least someone who stood her ground. I was tired of being on my best behavior. I was the most foolish when I was on my best behavior.

***

We stayed out. And I took Dean to _that_ bar. To _his_ bar, where I had met him midday to return the key to the storage unit full of counterfeit cash. I’m sure I did so consciously at the time, but I don’t remember suggesting it. I don’t remember the drive over there. I don’t remember getting a table. I think I just wanted to feel nearer to this recently discovered part of myself, this presence that felt like waking up for the first time in my life. Could I pretend this was who I was for one night? Could this be _my_ life?

I didn’t even expect to see Rio there, not really. But of course I wasn’t surprised when I did spot him all the way down at the other end of the bar, seated in the very same barstool where he had been during our meeting. It seemed too predictable to be real, almost comical. Surreal, how simply I waltzed into a space of his and found him there. How could he be so discreet but so easily found? How did he walk the line of _crime boss_ and _normal enough_ to blend into the background? An extra out-of-focus in the background of a film.

But I doubted myself just a little bit—I was quite drunk by then after all, several glasses of bourbon in and I felt the liquor move through me like a heated lazy river. And then he looked up, glanced over, looked right at me. Right into my eyes, as if he needn’t search through the crowd and scan the faces. He knew right where to look, and so I wasn’t sure who saw who first. He held my gaze; kept looking and didn’t look away. And then the mass of bodies in the wide space between us moved, a swarm of bees at the entrance to the hive, clustered and crowded, and I lost sight of him.

Then there was Dean, trying and failing to earn the attention of a passing server for another round of drinks. I couldn’t sit there any longer, my mind and body were buzzing as if I had just experienced an earthquake. I was already up and out of my seat, mumbling an excuse to Dean and turning on my heel before I could hear any response from across the table.

I wound through the crowd towards the restroom. I just needed a few minutes to calm down, I thought. I felt like I was being watched, could feel heat of a gaze trained to my back as I retreated into the belly of the bar.

I entered the bathroom and the world outside it collapsed away. The thumping of the bass through the walls, the muted din of patrons beyond the door. At least now I had a little distance—from everything.

I looked at myself in the mirror, using the sink in front of me to steady myself. Searched my face for any trace of the woman I had spent my life believing I was. Imagined myself being the kind of woman who is unfaithful. Imagined being the kind of woman her leaves her family one day and never sees them again. I could hardly believe I was the same woman as a year ago, before the lying and the money, before the grocery store and _that_ money, before Amber, before I thought nothing of our stability or place in the world, before Rio. _Before_.

I felt split between those two women— _before_ and _after_. Could I be that woman again? Was _this_ always who I was?

I didn’t know I was capable of all this, before. Spent so much of my life within the carefully drawn lines of the straight and narrow path. And now? I was unsure how I could feel both so empowered and yet awash with doubt.

I thought I just needed a few minutes. A few minutes to calm down, to collect myself, and go back out and face my husband, and suggest leaving. Although it wasn’t the same panic induced by the sense of danger I felt at the park when I spotted his sleek dark car across the street, I still felt a twinge of fear. I wasn’t afraid of him (not here). I was afraid of what it meant, me coming here to find him. Consciously or not, I had done it.

And then the door behind me opened. I didn’t expect it to be _him_. I almost thought I was hallucinating, as if I had imagined a vision of him into existence in the room with me. But I heard the door click shut and his dark eyes met mine in the mirror and I knew he was real. He’d come for me.

I turned to face him, and I stepped forward, and he didn’t yield, and I thought _I’m going to use him_ , and I reached behind him to lock the door. His woody, masculine scent. Only inches from each other now. It seemed like the only other times we ever got _this_ close to one another he was wielding a gun, either threatening me with it or teaching me how to hold it, depending on the day.

I thought I could be that version of myself—the one who came _after_ , the one who takes risks, the one who came up with ideas in the face of a problem _and_ knew how to execute them. The one who made decisions. I want to be someone who knows what she wants, reaches out, and takes it.

I could be her. Elizabeth.

And that night in that moment all I wanted was to feel something other than a rolling boil of anger, something other than self-pity. Anything but that. I could deal with the destruction later—after.

Felt the cool edge of the sink under my palms. Angled my hips and hiked up the skirt of my dress. I think about this now and it still feels a bit unreal, as if someone else did this.

No—all me.

And here was another escalation, like approaching the tracks of an on-coming train. Took me years to get here and now the choice was the difference between going one step forward and obliterating myself or _staying put_. Here was a cliff’s edge, and I didn’t just jump off, I flung myself out into that shapeless void over the cliff. It was desirable, to leap. _But wasn’t it the grocery store? Or, rather, when I went searching for him, in the rusted industrial park where I left my pearls for him to find?_ Maybe this, another caress on the way down?

His hands on my skin were new and electrifying. The presence of him against me, the heat of his breath as he buried his face into my hair and the crook of my neck. I was just nerve-endings by this point, little thrills blooming like wildflowers across my skin.

A hand up my skirt, pulling at my panties, tearing at them. His desperation surprised me and turned me on—he wanted to fuck me, right here right now. Panties not even down to my ankles and he’s touching me and I’m wet, I feel his fingers—thin, precise—slick as he touches me. And I feel dizzy. I grip the edge of the sink. Spread my legs a bit, moving my stance wider, tilting into his hand. I only hear his breathing, heavy and from deep within him, no longer any muffled bass tones, just him. Just me.

I hear his zipper. Look up, into the mirror. He catches my eye. Searches for a moment, one final pause. I bite my lip. I see myself. I recognize her. Whatever he’s looking for he finds and then I feel him _there_. And my entire body is ringing like a four-alarm fire bell. Overstimulated, my mind blank. My brain power went full physical—I was a body, I was sensation and noise. No thoughts—I was totally and absolutely bodily present in a way I had only fleetingly experienced.

I felt myself open up to him, a delightful and overwhelming pressure-ache in my pelvis. I felt my legs beneath me stiffen, the muscles of my thighs strong and taught like cables. Gave him back what he gave me.

He said something after a minute, maybe—something like _Come here_ or _Over here_ or maybe it was just a sound from his throat. Pulling away but taking me with him, his hands strong and guiding on my hips. Pressed against the opposite wall now, he helped me bring my legs up around his waist, held me by the bottom of my thighs and my ass. I grabbed onto him and felt the hard wall flat against my back and the weight of him against my front, the heat of his mouth this time on my throat. The sweetness of Mezcal on his breath. And then the fullness and friction of him there between my legs, pushing inside me and grinding me back against the wall. Both of us, our skin, what parts we felt against each other where the fabric of his jeans or my dress didn’t cover, the patch of skin on the back of his neck where I clung to him, all hot to the touch. And how he moved inside me. I was both out of breath and squeaking out sounds, little moans, desperate to release any of the mounting pressure threatening to make my entire body explode like a New Year’s Eve popper.

His own grunts echoed my own. Just as overcome as I was, both of us clawing at each other. His hot mouth on my skin, his hands gripping at the flesh on my hips and thighs. Suddenly he felt like an equal. He is always so composed and careful! Even when he’s heated mad, he chooses his words, his movements, carefully. We were just raw desire.

It was only a few minutes. The excitement and rush of a geyser, the moment dissipating into an iridescent mist. Trembling against each other for one long grounding beat. I didn’t know if my legs would be able to stay under me like they had in front of the sink but as he gently released me, there I stood against the wall. Stunned dumb.

I wanted to say something to him, felt like I should have something to say to him after all that, after I hadn’t spoken a single word to him through _all that_. I wanted him to say something to me. Anything. Something to break the spell of the moment, to shake me from this alternate universe and back into the real world.

But I had nothing—my mind processing nothing, just intaking information. A buzz on the periphery like reverb. He looked at me and touched my hair, smoothing it slowly out of my face. The touch was so soft and in such contrast to the last five minutes that my eyes slipped shut, a cat relaxing into a pet.

I felt him turn to leave, watched him unlock the door, throwing the smallest glance back at me over his shoulder before disappearing through the doorway and into the crowd. I thought about how he would have to walk past our table, where Dean was still seated and waiting for me to return. Wondered if they would notice each other, if Dean would recognize Rio as he breezed by him. Thought about how I was certain I would walk up to Dean and he would take one look at me and _know_ , he would be able to _tell_ , he would _sense_ it.

I took a deep breath that wavered just barely at the edges, and then another, until I felt utterly still. Now that I was alone, that Rio’s enormous presence wasn’t taking up space in the room with me, I could almost believe I dreamed the whole thing. But the proof of us dribbled down my inner thigh when I took my first wobbling step away from the support of the wall, and my panties were nowhere to be found although I searched across the floor of the bathroom for them.

I used the toilet and then washed my hands mechanically. Splashed some water on my face and hardly saw it reflected at me in the mirror, a blurry photograph at best. I was waiting for the blow of regret, bracing myself, but nothing happened. The world stayed propped upright.

And Dean noticed nothing out of the ordinary as I approached the table again, feeling exposed and scandalous without underwear under my dress. He was clueless. I wondered at that. Marveled, even. I had been clueless, too.

On the drive home I kept replaying the whole night in my head, seeing it all play out as if on the big screen. Watching from outside myself, looking in on the scene. My body hummed along with the low frequency of the memory. This was a whole new rush, another level discovered. I allowed myself to wade around in this attractive and lust-sticky level until Dean parked in our driveway—and then I carefully folded it all in on itself and pushed it into the back of the vault in my mind.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!  
> \- J


End file.
